The sky’s the limit
Posted by Paul Caskey on November 15, 2011
A quick tour around Bill Coleman and Laurence Lemieux’s website (Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie) reveals a pair of artists who know no bounds. While a good chunk of their individual and collective experience includes an abundance of works made for the stage, it also includes a number of projects others would only dream of. You know, the “wouldn’t it be cool if…” kind of musings born from good drink and spirited company. Wouldn’t it be cool if we took over a town in the middle of the prairies and invited a who’s who collection of artists to come and make work and got all the townspeople to be involved and then did a performance in Grasslands National Park? How about: Wouldn’t it be cool if we made a play list of Sun Ra songs, assembled a kick ass ensemble of dancers from across Canada, and then invited the Arkestra to come and play live us? Ya, we could even go on tour with them!!
I don’t know where they get their ideas, but what ideas they get. The Grasslands Project (Where Heaven Meets Earth) happened in 2004 (and the Gros Morne Project in 2006), and Hymn to the Universe has been touring on and off with the Sun Ra Arkestra since 2008. Around that same time, Coleman and Lemieux invited James Kudelka to be the company’s resident choreographer (why not ask one of North America’s most celebrated ballet choreographers to join the fun?) and secured the rights to remount three classic works from his repertoire. Dream big or go home, right!?
From Grasslands to Gros Morne to music halls with the Arkestra to… a balletic evening full of glorious pas de deux, sweeping gowns, and amazing dancers in full flight underneath the limelight. Wow, talk about extremes, but it seems that this is where Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie thrive. While this diverse repertoire accurately encapsulates their artistic interests, performing classically derived work is by no means unusual; ie. they are as comfortable on stage as they are in site-specific situations, perhaps thanks in large part to the “compagnie” part of the bargain.While Bill and Laurence are the artistic motors, each project involves a select group of collaborators whose talents and experience are suited for the project. For a project such as In Paradisum, dancers of exquisite technical calibre need to be engaged (as Kudelka’s work is notoriously challenging). There’s nothing like the right person(elle) for the job, and Bill and Laurence seem to have an endless list of stellar collaborators to bring on board.
Given their track record for pulling off feats of magic in the most unlikely of circumstances, I am sure In Paradisum is going to be a memorable evening of beautiful dance. Don’t miss it: Nov 18 at 8PM in the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium
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